Adobe Premiere Elements 9 Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
Adobe’s feature-rich video-editing package for consumers adds a few cool new features, as well as the stability that users of previous versions have long wished for. Read More…

What We Liked…

Excellent user interface

Modes for novices and experienced editors

Supports wide variety of video formats, cameras

Good performance

What We Didn’t…

Sharing functions split across program modules

No 64-bit support to take advantage of systems with more than 4GB

Adobe Premiere Elements 9 Review

By Denny Atkin, reviewed October 26, 2010

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Adobe’s latest iteration of its consumer video-editing program, Premiere Elements 9, isn’t as heavy on completely new features as its photo-editing equivalent, Photoshop Elements 9. Its enhanced video-sharing features, audio-cleanup tools, and improved import feature are welcome additions to the program, but alone they probably don’t justify the cost of upgrading from the previous version. However, Photoshop Elements has seen major enhancements under the hood that make it faster, more responsive, and best of all, stable. Stability has been an issue with this program for a long time, and with its rich feature set and now-reliable operation, we can finally recommend Premiere Elements to newcomers and upgraders alike.

As with the previous version, Premiere Elements imports virtually all popular video formats, including AVCHD and HDV high-def video, as well as DV and other standard-definition formats. New to version 9 is support for direct import from the popular Flip video cameras and a number of digital SLR models.

You can now import and edit videos shot by Flip video cameras without converting them first.

The interface is easy to use whether you’re new to video editing or an old hand. For a quick video, simply drop video clips onto the Sceneline, add transitions, and render the results. For more control, switch to the Timeline view, where you can add dozens of videos, narrations, and music tracks, making precise edits to each and adding advanced video effects.

Premiere Elements 9 offers a full timeline view similar to Premiere Pro…

…in addition to a simplified Sceneline view.

Premiere Elements 9 features an extensive selection of professional-looking video filters, transitions, and titling options for manual editing, as well as a series of InstantMovie templates that will automatically take your selected clips and assemble a video complete with titles, effects, music, and credits. The program analyzes your video for interesting elements—action, faces, and so on—and does a pretty good job of picking out good clips for these automatically generated movies.

You can tweak the frequency of cuts and effects in automatically generated InstantMovie productions.

InstantMovie has been enhanced to give you greater control over the variety and frequency of special effects, letting you choose between subtle enhancement and over-the-top music-video-style excess. Along with the already rich selection of video effects, Premiere Elements 9 adds the NewBlue Cartoonr Plus effect, which does an impressive job of giving live-action video the look of a cartoon.

The Cartoonr Plus plug-in can apply a variety of animation styles to your videos.

Also new is a set of filters from NewBlue for cleaning up audio: Audio Polish, Auto Mute, Cleaner, Hum Remover, Noise Fader, and Noise Reducer. You can use these to reduce hum, hiss, background noise, and other distractions from the audio portion of your recordings. You can also brighten up muddy recordings or even add a little reverb to the audio mix. Though it took a bit of experimentation with various adjustment dials, we were able to use this to significantly improve the clarity of audio on a recording of a school play that was shot from the rear of the theater.

The new audio filters can help you reduce noise and improve the tone of your audio.

In addition to creating DVD and Blu-ray discs, rendering files for playback on computers and portable devices, and uploading videos to popular sharing sites, Premiere Elements 9 adds the ability to create Web DVDs. These Flash-based projects can be shared on Photoshop.com or saved to disk for posting on your own Web site. They differ from traditional Web videos in that they can have full DVD-style menus, complete with a scene index and chapter menus. And unlike traditional DVDs, they can contain HD content. Premiere Elements 9 makes creating menus from the wide variety of included templates easy, and our test Web DVD project played back smoothly even on a relatively slow DSL connection.

Web DVDs are Flash videos that include full DVD-style title and chapter menus.

The biggest issue we had with last year’s Premiere Elements 8 was that the program was crash-prone. We encountered quite a few crashes-to-desktop while using the program. This year’s upgrade, on the other hand, was solid in our testing, with no crashes or lockups. That’s not to say it’s flawless: We encountered a few minor glitches, such as Premiere Elements losing track of one of its included MP3 audio files used to create an InstantMovie project when we reloaded it; we had to point the application at its own program directory before we could reload the file. Still, glitches were few and far between, and it we could edit projects without worrying that we’d suddenly be dumped to the desktop. That’s something we couldn’t say about Version 8.

Along with that stability comes improved performance, as well. The user interface is more responsive than earlier versions, and the rendering engine has been improved significantly. The background rendering feature added in Premiere Elements 8 is gone here, as the preview window is responsive enough that background rendering isn’t necessary. In cases such as InstantMovie creations, which are highly effects-intensive, Premiere Elements 9 will offer to render a preview version during the movie-generation process. Premiere Elements 9 remains a 32-bit program (Premiere Pro CS5 is now a 64-bit application), so it’s limited to addressing a maximum of 4GB of RAM. Because of this, very large HD projects can bog down the program’s usually spry user-interface performance.

Operations like adding clip art and text bubbles to your videos are normally smooth but can bog down with large HD projects.

The Organizer module, which lets you manage both videos and photos, is shared with Photoshop Elements 9. If you own both programs, the Organizer—and its database—are shared between them, letting you easily edit and incorporate stills from your photo collection as part of your video projects. In addition to allowing you to catalog and add tags to your videos and photos, the Organizer module will automatically analyze your videos for various characteristics such as contrast, focus, dialogue, low volume, and so on. This can be helpful for finding, say, in-focus clips containing faces when working with a large library of video files.

Among the other improvements in the updated Organizer is the ability to share videos, in addition to photos, on Facebook. (See our review of Photoshop Elements for more on the updated Organizer.) This feature allows you to post both standard- and high-definition projects to your Facebook profile.

You can select videos using the Organizer and upload them directly to Facebook.

However, because the Facebook upload feature is in the Organizer, you must first render and save your project to disk before you can post it. And herein lies one of the most frustrating aspects of the split Editor/Organizer setup: Sharing features are haphazardly split between the two modules. Want to share a video on YouTube, Photoshop.com, or the Podbean podcasting site? You do that from the Share tab in the Premiere Elements 9 Editor module. But if you want to post it on Facebook or share it as an e-mail attachment, you do it from the Share tab in the Organizer module. We hope Adobe unifies the sharing functions in one place in a future update.

Adobe includes a basic membership to its Photoshop.com backup and sharing site with the software, but this comes with just 2GB of storage, which isn't very much at all when you're talking about video. For $49.99 per year (or an extra $40 if you purchase a "Premiere Elements 9 Plus" package directly from Adobe), you can join Adobe's Plus program and increase your storage to a more useful 20GB. In addition to the storage, the Plus membership gives you access to additional tutorials and regularly updated templates.

The Photoshop.com sharing site mimics the interface used by Premiere and Photoshop Elements.

Though it’s short on completely new features, the more responsive performance and dramatically better stability make Premiere Elements 9 a must-have for users of earlier versions of the program. Newcomers will appreciate its rich feature set and balance of automation and flexibility. Now that you can edit videos without fear of losing work to a crash, Premiere Elements finally earns our Editors’ Choice award.